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6Apr/1025

Seat belt PSA (Ad Council) – Early ’70s

By request: "What's Your Excuse?" ... with some very creepy video/sound effects. Voiced by Jack Webb (not Scott Muni as I previously thought). Watch, but don't wrinkle your dress.

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  1. Jack Webb always had an angle, be it telling us to put on our belts, not to smoke those dirty jazz cigarettes with the hippies on the sunset strip or be a pinko commie..those were the days LOL

  2. I like this one

  3. Even now people come up with dumb excuses for not wearing seat belts.

  4. waist seat belts kill too but the one that covers your chest and waist will protect you more then the waste ones well at least you will survive

  5. I remeberthses in the late 60s. It was haunting. When we were kids we would say MMMM MUMMY!! when we heard the music because the last two looked like mummies from a horror flick. We would say wear your seat belts or it’s mmmmMummuy!! or aaayy Mummy!! We even say mummy belts. The ads were effective because we both wear our seat belts when we drive.

  6. This commercial made me buckle up when I got my licence..

  7. wan’t that creepy if you want creepy see “PSA 1973 – Smokey the Bear with Joanna Cassidy”

  8. Creepy, but effective…as a side note, this PSA was aired during the first commercial break on the 9/4/72 premiere of The (New) Price is Right (the first break was always taken up by either a 60-sec. PSA or network promo, in those days).

  9. 1961 or 1971? Marijuana didn’t get big till 67 or 68.

  10. Posing bitch.

  11. hey that voice narrating is Sgt Joe Friday of the Los Angels Police Dept Parker division he and his partner busted me for smoking a marijuana ciggerette in 1961 he is a badd ass

  12. I can watch it, and I’m 16.

  13. man this be crazy stuff…doze seat belt things are real killer and will attack your girl when you pulled over to the side of the road to vomit…yeah man a seat belt attacked my girl and said she was stupid then it acted like it didn’t do anything but my girl don’t lie and I saw it attack her and also call her names then when I walked closer it resumed itself into a normal seat belt…perhaps this was due to me “seat belting” a small meterorite that was on par with the 1974 classic “Kill Dozer”

  14. No … and the whole tone was very sedate. “You’re about to be taken on a ride by a killer … a drunk driver ….” Just a basic old-school voiceover about stats and the dangers of drunk driving.

    It just shows that nothing has changed in 40 years.

  15. Better a breathing square than a circle splattered all over the pavement. :-)

  16. 0:18 the guy looks the same even without wearing the seatbelts

  17. It was about, oh, 20 years before I was born, so 36 years ago?

  18. Well I’m a square.

  19. Yeah, I was just telling bobfritz1466 that! The lady whose dress wasn’t to get wrinkled – her eyes through the bandages
    is the weirdest thing, beside the genius use of teh tympani.

  20. I totally hear ya! I remember this when I was like six or seven years old – that tympani was scary to a kid.

  21. Seatbelts?…man, those things are for squares

  22. hahaha. I thought I was the only one. :]

  23. Like most people who commented on this video, I remember being very unsettled by this commercial. As I recall, most of the Ad Council TV commercials of the late 60s and early 70s used shock tactics to get their point across. It worked! I’ve always worn a seat belt!

  24. Nothing like a tympani to scare the crap out of a little kid. Not much impact on me now, though. I didn’t know that was Jack Webb doing the voice over.

  25. Was that the one with the catch phrase “Scream Bloody Murder”?


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